Home and office centrally controlled lighting systems are known in the art. One such system is known as DALI (Digital Addressable Lighting Interface). DALI is a widely accepted standard for lighting controls. In a DALI system, a plurality of lighting devices are dispersed throughout a site, such as a home or office, and are controlled by an intelligent control unit or central computer. The plurality of lighting devices may be termed “slaves” and the central control computer is denoted a “master”.
In most prior art systems such a DALI, the connections between the master and the slave is in the form of hardwiring. In the present art, a DALI type system is usually used for the lighting in one room, i.e. master and slave are in the same room. By adding a gateway to each DALI control unit, a building-wide control system can be built. Introducing wireless lighting control is to eliminate the wires that have to be installed inside the walls or ceilings, which creates obstacles for retrofit in most old buildings.
Wireless control of a lighting system in a commercial or office building can bring a number of advantages to the building owners, users and lighting system manufacturers. Wireless control can be achieved by communicating between the master and slave utilizing radio frequency (RF) technology. RF technology however, poses obstacles of its own that are not present in a hardwired system. More specifically, in order to take the advantage of RF technology, the wireless lighting control system must employ a technique to combine the operation of standards such as DALI with RF communication protocol standards.
The current state of the art however, only includes solutions for hardwired lighting networks implementing DALI standard. There is no technique to extend DALI standard to manage plural wireless slaves. Most current available wireless lighting control systems use proprietary protocols instead of DALI. Additionally, the DALI protocol, and similar protocols, operate by assuming reliable communication between master and slave. These protocols assume for example, that every transmitted bit from every slave device will be reliably and timely received by the master without interference from other slave devices in the system. The DALI protocol also assumes that all information from the master will be correctly received by the proper slave device. The protocol does not provide for the errors, delays, and interference that may corrupt data in a wireless environment. The protocol also does not provide for a way to initialize slaves and bind the commands on the remote control master to the slaves. Binding is the process used to assign certain slaves to certain commands on the remote control master dynamically.